Nominations are open for radio stations to add to the rotating header. Bonus points for historically significant, pretty, unusual or special to you. Limit one entry per person per day. An explanation increases the chance of acceptance. Note that many transmitters are not visible from a road, so studio locations are better.

Those are good pics of radio stations. WBT looked solidly built.
You were mentioning nominations, I think WOWO Fort Wayne IN is a good nominee. You could pick them up good in the 60’s and 70’s in Virginia and West Virginia. They have three towers in the drive by pic off US-24, I guess they are ‘post redirection’ era.
WWVA would be another good one, but I think a tornado took the original towers down, didn’t we talk about that ?
Good idea Fred
parrott

WOWO-AM is an interesting story, and you know how I like stories! The regime that decided which frequencies would be 50 kw clear channel, regional Class B, local Class C and worthless Class D was set up in 1928. The car business was taking off. The expectation was that Fort Wayne, Indiana would become another Detroit. WOWO had been owned by Westinghouse and was an original CBS affiliate. It did not acquire the clear channel designation until 1941.

WOWO was of course the home of the world famous WOWO fire escape, the source for their weather reports. After the radio reforms on the Reagan era, WOWO was acquired by a company that wanted its New York City station to be able to stay on after sunset, so WOWO was downgraded and gave up its clear channel status.

Prior to 1996, station owners had national caps on how many stations they could own. As the population moved to California and the South, smaller stations were thrown overboard to allow acquisition of bigger stations. KQV-AM in Pittsburgh and WOL-AM in Washington DC fit that description – they were clogging up the national caps with no prospect of ever becoming a huge money maker.

Oh Mary walther is helping Brian Wilson this morning with Mornings on the mall, I bet they sign her up.
I wonder if the traffic ‘chick’ Jamee Witten is related to Dallas cowboys TE
Jason Witten ? He is from Tennessee.
I look forward to the new Chris plante show.
parrott

WGBN-AM in McKeesport PA, an AM station in the hands of a religious broadcaster is fined $25,000 for faded paint and non functioning lights they were told about last summer. They could face up to $450,000 in fines. They probably do not have enough cash to buy a new stapler.

Churches and non-profits don’t appreciate the risks of taking legal ownership of a radio station

On the way out the door, the Tom Wheeler FCC has given Spanish language TV and Radio station owner Univision permission to be 49% “foreign” “owned” – up from the current 25% limit in the law – but the law permits the FCC to make exceptions if it finds that ignorining the limit is in the public interest. It is anticipated that Univision is going to have an IPO

I listened to part of the show while updating the schedule. All I remember was him pointing out that other hosts were taking the week off. He didn’t mention names, but “the golfer” is probably who he meant. Since he wasn’t able to hear Rush for his show prep, he was going to instead talk about food.

A fair number of talk stations have switched away. The “product” is getting in short supply. Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard to plug holes in schedules isn’t exactly inspriring. Kilmeade was listing off new affiliates, mostly low power small town stations. Alex Jones is picking up some traction.

Chris Plante is officially syndicated. I spotted one non-Cumulus station picked him up at like 7 PM.

The replacement for Diane Rehm lost some of the affiliates. Perhaps some NPR affiliates hate black people.

I havn’t heard Jersey Devil. I have been buried in stupidity the last two days at work.
Seems everyone is throwing grenades in the server rooms these days. sigh,
Savage brought it on himself, that second /or lack of third hour was bad.
He got his award, made it into the radio archives history thing and interviewed Trump, then checked out. He is book writer these days.
I’m Ted Broer and Tom Sullivan these days in the 3pm to 6pm slot.
have a good one
parrott

Being the prick that he is, President Obama reappointed the Democratic FCC board member whose term just expired. The appointment requires senate approval so she won’t get in unless Donald Trump agrees to leave her in place.

That was part of the issue – her page shows the show being live in the afternoon, but an “encore” in the evening. It appears to be the opposite. Most of the stuff seems to be behind the paywall now. The last public podcast was in October

Her web site says to listen on talkstreamlive, but she is not in their app. Maybe it only is visible while the show is live. There is a phone number to dial to listen

Somewhat related, Michael Savage has been touting that he is #1 in streaming based on talkstreamlive, which Tammy Bruce used to do. The quickest way to assess that claim is that Rush Limbaugh isn’t listed at all

The streaming link became visible on her web site at show time. Hung up the phone and switched to the stream – better quality. Still just music. It is now :12 after the hour. Several commercials now…. I need some goat milk soap with vitamins, uh-huh.

Yeah KYAH in 2015 had John B Wells 4pm eastern to 7pm . That was pretty good, they were a two day delay from his live show. But I guess he didn’t like freebies.
I didn’t know about ‘Rense’ I’ll have to try it out. I think Alex has had some turnover the last year with staff.

Hey if you want to list Coast to Coast Am a day late on CMFJ Toronto, from 9pm to 12pm , they are consistent M-F. They carry Noory him live after 1am.
Tonight I heard about Navajo Indians, who said their medicine men could open a ‘Stargate’. Ummm Hmmmmm. I heard that right.
Did I tell you about the time I had went to the ‘moon’ in Lynchburg VA ? I had some (a lot) of tequila and the damn tennis courts at the local community college, were purple color and had craters ! I kid you not. It was so real.
Queue Red Skelton, me-na-me-na song.
L_O_L 1984 I was messed up, but it was so fun.
parrott

A lot of stuff simply doesn’t exist. On WBT-TV, they had a daily live TV show with a woman named Betty Feazor. She would make mikkenials skin crawl. The overall purpose of her show was to teach Southern women how to be a good wife to their husband. She would do things like teach how to cook, do needlepoint, clean spills on furniture, repair clothing, etc… because the show was live, only one half hour out of 20 years of shows has survived. Preserving video tapes were “expensive”, so it was common to just erase them after the show aired. Some things that survived were because a station outside of the Eastern time zone had to record shows for delayed playback and they stuffed the tapes in a closet and forgot about it.

His biography on Wikipedia is more than a bit vague. My sense is when he looks in the mirror, he sees a space alien. Maybe he spent time at Timothy Leary’s house while Michael Savage was the lookout in case the narcs were about to break up the party.

hi, everybody. new to this posting comments thing and i don’t think i’m in the right section of your website but wanted you to know that glenn beck was discussing the story about norway ending fm radio. (i saw something about that on here recently.) he and his compatriots were also playing with something called google home on friday. (jeffy got one.) you can talk to it and it answers you, kinda, sorta… if you ask it right. it was a funny segment.

thank you, fred, for this wonderful website and the tukeys blog. i learn alot. love the polls == funnier than many of letterman’s top 10 lists.

I’m guessing it is the same thing on that bot foreplay post. Right now, the two bots interacting with each other is a bit awkward. There are several loops it tends to get stuck in, and is overly concerned with whether each other are bots, but with a little fine tuning, it could make excellent inexpensive programming for MSNBC.

Getting to digital FM would solve a lot of issues, but it isn’t the NAB that will make it happen. The radio biz got lazy and now obsesses at using the government the stop new competition.

The foreign ownership will be a really big deal as Amazon drowns all of retail. There is no reason they could not put auto parts stores out of business next. Auto parts stores are one of the remaining national radio categories.

I bumped into an entire network of stations overtly being programmed in Mexico and distributed to US radio stations without a main studio waiver. At least two appear to be unlicensed pirate stations. What would FM radio be like if the smallest markets had 150 active channels?

>”What would FM radio be like if the smallest markets had 150 active channels?<"
Carp !
these LPFM are bad enough.
I don't know what you can do about a a'zon. China-mart's website is amateur-ish compared to Big 'A'. Maybe someone will come along and give competition. The 'Sears club rewards' program isn't going to do it. ( They maybe gone by the end of 2017-18) .
Brave new world. Has anyone tried that new browser called ‘Brave’ ? I meant to download it and install but haven’t had the chance. Work seems to get in the way.
parrott

On the subject of 150 active channels per market, I’d like to pose a question, since this site is about radio stations and broadcasting: what type of receiver is everybody using? i.e. brands & models. I’ve got a few SW multi-band receivers, but I’m looking for an easy-to-use non-digital radio for my wife. Portable, good battery life, analog tuning, AM/FM with great selectivity/sensitivity for MW DXing at night, for under $50.

dear chairman: i have something called a clutch radio by sony. bought it a zillion years ago at target. it’s so old it has the band where you could listen to local tv broadcasts. it’s real easy to use (sounds like your wife isn’t in to the technical stuff any more than me) and the batteries last a long time. (it uees 3 “aa” batteries; easy to replace them.) .also has a weather band. i use it when the power goes out. says on the back it is sony model number icf-m410v. when the power is on, i listen to radio on a bose, a radio from c crane that’s sort of a bedside radio (but ugly) and an internet radio i also bought from c crane. good luck finding her something she likes.

oh — the price. it was under $50. as i remember, around $35, but, as i said, it was ages ago.
p.s.: it’s called a clutch radio because it resembles a ladies clutch purse. your wife will understand and explain it to you, if necessary.

dear chairman: wow — sixty bucks. and i actually have 2 of them. i could sell out and fred could tell me how to invest my capital gain.
i’m so happy you found a radio that will suit your wife’s needs. hope it gives her years of enjoyment.
be well.

How far away are you hoping to listen to Medium Wave (MW) AM? I assume your interest is limited to the United States and maybe Mexico, not Europe, which has largely abandoned AM of all types and close to pulling the plug on analog FM.

The experiment with AM/HD in the US was a miserable failure. For stations that keep broadcasting it, the signal has a side band that clobbers the adjacent analog AM DX stations and sounds like a whine. Most AM operators have turned it off. The NAB is warming up to the idea of converting to all digital AM, in which case the radio you are looking for will stop working – so now is not the time to buy a high end Analog-only AM radio.

The following are questions you would want to consider, not necessarily answered here.

Will she be listening on ear phones/buds? How important is music sound quality and volume? Will she be using it where she is free to point the antenna? How about weight and size? Would she be carrying it in a purse full time?

My personal experience will not be very helpful, as I stopped doing DX once streaming became available. The car radio is the only thing I use and I do not drive after dark. I have a small portable radio for emergencies, and a big combo radio with cassette recorder from the 1970s that I never use, and probably no working batteries. Radio Shack died, which is where I typically went in the past for this stuff. I would probably check Walmart, Best Buy and maybe ebay or amazon.

This will sound pessimistic but is the reality. If the SHTF and society disintegrates, I will stay in situ until some black lives matter person blows my head off. I neither have the interest nor ability to run. The value to civilization to have a computer programmer in a post-Apocalyptical society will probably not be very much. Your situation is different.

With regard to a radio receiver, I had considered all the issues you mentioned. To expound a bit:

A table-top size radio 9″ x 5″, easy to handle, no ear-bud usage. Mostly evening listening on AM in bed, with occasional use outdoors, etc (hence the $50 limit in case of loss, damage, or theft).

The Sony unit that ‘Countess’ owns is a nice size, except it has digital tuning. Would prefer analog tuner for DXing and battery life (my criteria). i.e. Most anything designed and built after ~1998 for more power efficient circuitry.

LOL ‘Sporks’ When I was a kid, cole slaw & mashed potatoes from KFC (1970’s ) man that was good eating !
Now they want you to buy a spork for charity at Eddie Bauer stores. $3.00 for a spork and they send one to Africa & Baltimore.
parrott

here is my deeply troubling question re sporks (in addition to the design issue fred raised): corn starch is a thickening agent widely used in chinese sauces (and sometimes in baking to get a finer texture to the cake.) so how do you turn a white powder that feels kinda “silky” into a plastic-y eating utensil? if we can’t trust the chinese to abide by international trade agreements, how can we trust them on something as critically important to american culture as sporks?

To make you a little more paranoid, try on my favorite conspiracy theory. Imagine that the Chinese have embedded secret code in electronic devices – phones, computers, DVRs, big screen TVs – and in response to receiving some special signal, the device will go into self-destruct mode, setting itself on fire.

Now 50 million homes and businesses and probably every government office and power plant are on fire, and those that are not will soon be. Fire departments are designed to put out one or two fires at a time, not 100,000 .

parrott: finally i now know what a spork is (because of your post.) i had been thinkin’ it was some sort of computer or radio or car thngy that you all know about and non-technos don’t. now i get it. thanks.

L_O_L That’s good, robini, glad I could clarify the ‘spork’ , they are classic ! I do have a couple ‘sporks’ in the Jeep ( in case of emergency Cheesecake Factory, cheesecake)

So Fred is ‘Crypto Prepper’ ! Yeah ,
“thousand pounds of gold” L_O_L , make sure you order from the Infowars store the
‘colon-clense’ and the ‘Diatomaceous earth’ and their ‘Brain-fart’ nutri-ceautical.
parrott

I have been pondering what the actual benefit of a Spork is compared with just a plastic spoon. The value of a fork is you can stick it into something and pick it up. The pointy end of a Spork doesn’t really enable you to do that. Maybe Colonel Sanders had the patent on the spork. It’s not like the Chinese would care

Well done creating that spork poll question. I hereby issue a presidential medal of valor for your heroic effort

I am hoping to seduce Jaymar into writing some “polls”. I sense he has lots of questions that need answers. I have a poll question in mind but I don’t know enough to pull together a set of answers. The poll question would be “what is your favorite Cuban dish?”. One possible answer is “Maria, the waitress down at the little Havana restaurant”

dear everybody: last year i discovered that kyw (the all-news station in philly) is broadcasting the audio of “sixty minutes” on sunday nights from 7 to 8 pm eastern time. kyw is a cbs o&o station (owned and operated) and, of course, “sixty minutes” is produced by cbs television.QUESTION: are any of you in other parts of the country hearing “sixty minutes” audio on cbs stations in your area? kyw is cramming local ads every which way possible into the audio feed. i figure there are two possible reasons kyw is simulcasting “sixty minutes.” ONE: so they can cram local ads every which way possible into the audio. TWO: so the newsroom can order pizza at 7;01, have it delivered, eat it, clean up the evidence and get back on the air with fake news by 7:59.

By the way, cbs owns a bunch of radio stations here in philly — kyw, plus an oldies station, a country station, a talk station (wpht, the old wcau 1210 am). they are ALL up for sale. have been for a while.

I’ll give you a few high-level details and you can ask things that might interest you. CBS is controlled by Sumner Redstone, who is very old and in poor health. He does not own a majority of the company but controls a majority of the votes. His daughter is involved In a tug-of-war for a control against redstone’s former girlfriend / partner.

CBS is well down the path of splitting off the Radio company and launching an IPO sometime this year. Having both the television and radio, and Redstone controlling Viacom creates lots of opportunities to slosh money around to take advantage of the way Wall Street values companies, and the IRS computes taxes. I have already stated that I would not touch the CBS IPO with a 10 foot pole.

Most of the all news stations in the United States are operated by CBS. All News, all the time is extremely expensive. But when you also own the TV station in town with its own news department, you can make that work. WTOP in Washington DC is the one major exception that is not owned by CBS radio. It previously was owned by the Mormon church. In 2015, WTOP took him an estimated $65 million. That will pay for a very good full-time newsgathering organization. The obvious reason is Washington DC is full of people with billions of dollars of other people’s money to spend who listen to the station on the way to work.

The airing of 60 minutes on the radio stations goes back as long as I can remember (which means at least 2004). Virtually nobody is listening to AM Radio on Sunday evening. They are glued to their TV is watching football games or doing something interesting like going out to eat Philly cheesesteaks.

It is universally a bad idea to put the audio of a TV program on a radio station, even though it is inexpensive programming – something lost on Glenn Beck and increasingly on Alex Jones. The radio audience cannot see the video when you hold up something and say “look at this”, and TV can be extremely stupid sounding with just the audio.

Sometime, as an experiment, listen to a TV show without looking at the screen. Within a couple minutes, the laugh track and dialog will drive you crazy and you wonder why you watch TV at all. Television IS literally hypnosis. The way to detect this is that you become unaware of what is going on around you beyond staring at the flickering picture. Your mind is now wide open to absorb everything it sees, and often cannot later distinguish between reality and what you watched on the screen. The same thing applies to using an iPad 😉 but it least it is not a passive activity, unless you use it like a television. I stopped watching TV in 1996 with no regrets.

Airing the audio of a TV program on radio has many legal entanglements, especially as it relates to commercials. The union contracts for TV and radio were designed separately, so when a national TV advertisement is airing on a radio station, that is a problem. Are the actors on the TV commercial entitled to receive royalties from the radio station? It is a complicated issue and I don’t know the answers, just that there are problems. If the TV is then streamed to the Internet via radio station, now it becomes a three-part legal mess, especially if music is played during the TV show.

I forgot that overnight host Jon Grayson ended his syndication with Cumulus owned Westwood one on January 1st. He will continue to be on the CBS owned stations that were carrying him.

It looks like “progressive talk radio” is at a dead end – finally. It has clung on a long time after the Chapter 7 bankruptcy of Air America, being syndicated by cumulus media, probably with non disclosed financial backing of the democratic party and their related money resources. Ed Shultz was specifically hired to do his show with a guaranteed funding from the Democrats, independent of the ability of the show to generate advertising revenue. Labor unions were a big part of that money and appeared regularly on his show. Nobody ever pressed the FCC as to whether that violated the payola rules.

Another progressive talk station in New York has just given up, because there are not enough hosts and hours left in the day to fill a programming schedule. Tom Taylor’s story mentions Bill Press going away, but I am unaware of that, although he may have been cut back to only two hours. Change is coming very fast.

Cox Radio also is firing people in significant quantities. They are a relatively small player, and Herman Cain is no longer syndicated. The pattern seems to be that cumulus is pulling up the drawbridge in the Westwood One syndication business. Dorothy has splashed water on the commercial radio business and it is melting. Clicking your ruby slippers three times will not take you back to Kansas

Bill Press is toast. The only station carrying him this morning is WCPT-AM in Chicago. WCPT is a “daytimer”, an AM station that can’t turn the transmitter on until the sun comes up or 6 AM, whichever is earlier. So the show is now at 7-9 AM ET on one station nobody can hear, and available on podcast.

Hungary is going to actively chase George Soros. Those are probably completely unrelated.

Bill Bennett has ended his remaining relationship with Salem broadcasting. Since turning the morning show over to Hugh “nuclear triad” Hewitt, Bennett was doing prerecorded interviews on the weekend. Thst has ended.

Gordon Chang appears regularly (at least once a week) on John Batchelor, who I listen to on podcast to save time. He now works for the Daily Beast, which is somewhat inconsistent with his views. If he keeps predicting that China’s economy will fall apart, one day he will be correct.

fred: you’re right. he does do jb’s show alot. some nights i’ll hear him on frank gaffney’s show (9 to 10 eastern on the answer out of d.c.) and then go over to jb and — ta dah — it’s gordon change redux. (gaffney tapes his show early in the day.)
i thought gordon was now with forbes.com. i’d think that would pay better than the daily beast. lots of starving journalists around these days. (i recently checked on facebook for a friend my husband and i had worked with at two daily papers during the salad days in the 70s and 80s. he’d gone with the new york times on the special projects/investigative reporting desk around 2000. learned he’d packed it in and taken the buyout when there was yet another round of layoffs a couple years ago. now doing pr for a classy nonprofit in philly. it’s tough out there for ink-stained wretches.)

Speaking of ‘Bromance’ & ‘Sporks’ did you see that Current president gave his boy Biden a medal for participation.
The royal loyal order of the spork medal. Hell they give those like candy at halloween anymore. Michael Jordan ? He wasn’t no astronaut. He didn’t cure ‘gout.’ By gosh he could shoot a basketball.
‘ellen’ has a show and comes out of the closet. I guess the bruce genner will get a medal.
I think I would have rather been awarded a case of that Thick cut ‘presidential’ Bacon that has 25 year shelf life. ( Back when ‘presidential’ meant something). That they are always advertising.
That obo made the guys at the pentagon pay attention and have his boy Ash Carter pin a participation medal on him.
idiots
I Hope Donald Trump squashes the EPA like the zit it is ! They just don’t like Diesels.
Chairman hold on to your diesel. “They can have mine when they pry my cold dead hands off my Dodge ram CTD” !
EPA = sux. Like Biden said “a three letter word” J O B S . L_O_L x2 !

I don’t know if you visited the website, but shockingly the bacon is extremely expensive – about one dollar per slice . The price they quote never mentions the weight, just the number of slices. There are other companies selling real bacon for closer to a reasonable price – like eight dollars a pound.

Back in the days of the wagon trains, Bacon was very important. Meats that keep without refrigeration become pretty important, unless you want to kill your horses along the way to eat them. If you had the skills, perhaps you could hunt game for dinner, but that took time and slowed your journey down, and left you susceptible to Indian attacks.

“Real smoked bacon” fits that description. Between the salt and the smoking to remove water, it will not spoil. But what you buy in the supermarket is not real bacon – it is just pork belly injected with smoke flavoring and sugar and sodium nitrite or is it sodium nitrate? I get them confused. Therefore supermarket bacon needs refrigeration, especially after it is opened.

Same thing applies to the chicken eggs – they do not require refrigeration at all, but people do it because they are afraid they’ll get sick and egg companies fear liability. The fastest way to shorten thevlife of your eggs is to put them in that egg rack in the refrigerator door. You can judge the deterioration of the egg by the size of the air bubble. By all means do not ever wash store-bought eggs – the natural “bloom” that protects the unborn chicken from infection is removed during processing and replaced with mineral oil. If you wash off the mineral oil, you just removed the protection keeping the egg from spoiling.

The same is true of salted butter, although it will turn rancid after a few days. The salt and the lack of sugar or water provides nothing for bacteria or mold to latch onto, but rancid butter will not make you sick. If you put the butter in a ceramic crock, it will take two or three weeks before it becomes rancid. If you are not a cholesterolphobe and regularly use butter, you will use it up long before it comes rancid at room temperature.

Of course, the New York Times disagrees and fear mongers about things like this, and probably has issues with unpasteurized milk. You can never be too safe – the government is here to protect you from yourself

I have not visited their website. I kinda put them in the ‘buy some gold, and we’ll keep it in our vault’ category.
the commercial is funny.
Killer about the Butter& rancid. My grandparents always had butter on the table in a Fiestaware butter dish when I was a kid and live back in West Virginia.
Made by the Homer Laughlin china company, Newell W.VA, we have that original dish my grandmother had and some newer but they all look alike. You can swing a cat around here without hitting Fiestaware. We do the same and leave the butter on the table , even in the summer. Of course its in the butter dish. My nieces always thinks it is better here than at their home. Drives my brother crazy.
‘Buy a spork save a Kenyan railroad worker’ L_O_L

Freezing rain this morning in Virginia. I am not going anywhere.
parrott

The French version is called a butter bell. You put the butter in a cup in the lid and turn it upside down. Tge base of the container has an inch or so of water so it is higher than rim of the upside down cup. The water doesn’t touch the butter because air pressure blocks it. It provides an airtight seal, preventing the deterioration.

One of the ways I waste time is lookimg at street vendors in India cooking food. Humans are much more resilient than American society has taught us. Humans didn’t become the dominant species (for now) by hiding in safe spaces and using disinfectant hand lotion

Parrot, I saw your other comment on ‘EPA versus diesels’ a few days ago.

One of the reasons I limited my choice to the 7.3 Powerstroke or older 5.9 CTD is because those can use other fuels in case the SHTF. The 12v Cummins (and 7.3 PS) can use the following: Diesel #1 or #2, Kerosene K1 or K2, Jet-A, Jet A1, JP-4, and JP-8, plus veggie oil, used oil, etc… now that’s what I call a real flex fuel option! What changed in 1998 is the -electronic- dependency.

A few years ago, we sold our Mercedes 300CD (2-door coupe) TurboDiesel… if you needed a vehicle to survive an EMP event, that was it. I could disconnect the battery, alternator, all the belts, and that little Benz ‘tank’ would run. 😉

I’ve been looking for a VW Jetta TDI or 1996-2006 CDI to replace it. As you know, EPA changed the rules in 2007 and manufacturers complied (i.e. DEF).

I agree Chairman, I had written down the fuels that the 05 Cummins models would burn, I think its in the glove box. Thanks for this list of fuels.
I would like to pick up a gently used VW Jetta diesel as well.
I think everyone that has them realizes what they have
( EPA be damned) good reliable fuel efficient car and are not to worried. Just like you guys with the 7.3 , hold on to them very tightly, they’re gold !
Parrott

Soon to be ex FCC chairman Tom Wheeler will be going to the so-called “non-partisan” Aspen Institute. Expect very substantial change at the FCC. Expect net neutrality to be dismantled on day one. Wheeler passed it without any congressional authorization or public hearings or soliciting input from the Republican FCC members. He was behaving like a Syrian dictator dropping barrel bombs . So called net neutrality will go away so fast your head will spin, although we can count on the Democrats to file lawsuits to try to stop it.

Brian informed me while I was asleep that Pai was named to head the FCC. I have confirmed that with independent sources.

Since Pai traces his history to India, he would probably enjoy discussing whether it was Indians or Arabs would invented zero. Wars have been started over less.

Speaking of Indians, who came up with the idea that Christopher Columbus stupidly called the natives on the carribean islands Indians because he thought he was in India?

He was an Italian working for the queen of Spain and India was called Ceylon. We have known that the earth has a circumference of about 25,000 miles since the time of the ancient Greeks. Navigation at sea and map making relied on being able to measure where you were by looking at the sun and the stars. Christopher Columbus absolutely knew that he was nowhere near India.

Question everything you were taught in the schools funded by the federal government . Or religions.

In a last minute panic, literally, the TV broadcasters agreed to sell their licenses for $10 billion, down from the original demand for $80 billion

Assuming that it does not wind up in the courts, that means a lot more cell phone and or LTE service. The TV folks realized that if Donald Trump took office and this was not settled, they might get $0 dollars. The extra $7 billion could build a large part of that wall with Mexico. The wireless companies are paying 17 billion and the TV owners are getting 10

One of these Spanish language radio station owners has been delisted at NASDAQ and is imminently likely to fail. I thought I had created a profile of the company but I do not see one in the 2009 blog summaries.

The company is the publicly traded Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS). My vague memory which may be completely wrong is that they owned billboards in Los Angeles in addition to the radio stations. That used to be very common. They are more focused on the Cuban and Puerto Rican Hispanic community rather than Mexico.

One of the first issues facing the new FCC will be the issue of allowing more foreign ownership of radio and TV stations. The remaining democratic member Mignon Clyburn was advocating that loudly a year ago. Her motives were probably political rather than based on thoughtful public policy. As difficult as it is for the FCC to punish broadcasters, imagine trying to punish a broadcaster who is not even domiciled in the United States